#236: On Efficiency

March 18, 2018
·
Detroit, MI

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There’s an idea or series of connected ideas that keeps
recurring in my life, especially in moments I find myself
stuck in some aspect of my work. It popped up again this week,
while reading N.N. Taleb’s new book,
Skin in the Game:

“Anything you do to optimize your work, cut some corners, or
squeeze more ‘efficiency’ out of it (and out of your life)
will eventually make you dislike it.”

Interchangeable with the word “efficiency” is the word
“convenience.” When you abstract away the code, build your
website solely by dragging and dropping boxes in place, what
you gain in convenience you lose in the form of contact with
the underlying raw material. Here it is articulated in a
different way—Jim Tolpin in
The New Traditional Woodworker writing about what we
learn from shop classes and home improvement shows:

“These sources point people toward working with wood as a
medium to be machined. In this mindset, tools and techniques
are presented in a way that mimic the tooling and processing
strategies of the industrial, production furniture maker and
not those of the pre-industrial artisan.”

In other words, power tools are more about manufacturing than
they are about making. High school shop classes teach you to
work in a factory. And IKEA furniture pushes it one step
further, teaching you to work in a specific kind of
factory—one where you over and over again click together the
same interchangeable parts.

You can see this everywhere. Meal kit delivery services, which
J and I have been getting for a few months now, less teach you
to cook than teach you to work in a restaurant. They replace
the act of selecting food at the grocery store, imagining and
deciding what you can make with it (let alone gathering or
growing it yourself, tending to it, pulling it from the soil)
with the act of picking out finished meals from on a screen of
delicious-looking images, delicious-sounding words. There are
no surpluses leading to future meals of impromptu soups and
fried rices. No cuisines will ever emerge from these kits’
tiny leftover plastic bags. No birds will be whittled from
leftover cuttings of birch veneer particleboard. All the edges
of creation—if I can mix metaphors a bit here—get smoothed
away in the name of efficiency.

Startup companies think about everything in terms of scale.
You could say that they work in the medium of scale.
The message we absorb from them, from interacting with their
products, is the message to ourselves do everything in a way
that can scale, even when we’re doing it only once, only for
ourselves.

But scalability in this sense is the antithesis of art.
Adhering too closely to formulas, blueprints for writing,
sucks the challenge, joy, reward—the soul—out of writing. Even
if those blueprints are ones I’ve derived myself from writing
the previous book. Writing fiction begs adding
friction; you want things to be reasonably difficult
for yourself, because their difficulty is what makes them
irreplicable, and their irreplicability is what gives them
value, enriches the process, makes the endeavor worthwhile.

You don’t have to call it soul, but this I believe to
be true: We know we lose something when we optimize for
efficiency. We know we’re essentially play-acting being
artists, without exposing ourselves to the humility and
vulnerability and risks of actually making art.

There’s a big caveat though, to the Taleb quote: It should
have the words “Up to a point” in front of it.
Up to a point, efficiency saps the soul from the
work. What exactly that threshold is … is a good topic for
next week.

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